A New Jersey lawyer teaching history to home-schooled children said he founded Web site Conservapedia.com to balance Wikipedia's alleged liberal bias.

Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc...religious/3154/

Why does this shitty wiki get so much press?

(Conservapedia, I mean )

When it was a novelty, I understand why it received press, but now it has been around a while and is still shitty the last time I checked.

Conservative media domination, of course. It's reached the level of "overwhelming" in the United States, and has begun to creep into the rest of the world as well, particularly the English-speaking countries.

This book has some useful info about that... written in 2004, though, so it's not current regarding Wikiland.

Here's a good condensed version.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030224/alterman2

CONSERVApedia? What a misnomer. More like XtianFundyPedia.

Yikes, written in 2003 - I was off by a whole year!

I was supposed to set up a separate subforum for "breakout" media-item discussions, wasn't I? I'll try to do that tonight sometime.

(later)

DONE!

Conservapedia-Watch anyone? I'd hate to see what a right-wing article on some of the hot button Wikipedia topics would be like.

There IS a Conservapedia-Watch, by another name.

www.rationalwiki.com

I just joined and am perparing for action;-)

(Two posts deleted by Somey, before and after this one)

Can we please keep this sort of post in the Tarpit. I believe that it would be possible to restrict individual users so that they can't post except in the Tarpit.

Indeed it is, but I'm thinking we should start just deleting these things altogether. Leaving them around just compels them to respond to each other, needlessly escalating the hostility.

I mean, there's really no way we're going to reconcile two people who are so diametrically opposed to each other politically, not to mention all the personal attacks that have taken place already... I'm not sure if there's a better way of dealing with it, but just tar-pitting the stuff isn't really working.

Sorry, guys...

Just a simple question...is this site about wikipeida or is this place Mr. FONORD23 personal sword for sticking it to the Republicans???

I willing to be nice, as long as you can put a muzzle on FONORD23 personal attacks and have him stop politicizing the board. Also, I don't like you completely removing my posts... I'm starting to get annoyed by it, particularly the one with the links to the books "BIAS" and "THOUGHT CRIME"...

I'm the reasonable one, not that rabid squirrel FONORD23, he's the nut job.

Any rate, you do what you want.

Hmmm... Obviously any "muzzles" that are applied will have to be applied even-handedly, or at least we'll try as best we can. And I don't like deleting posts either, but this is the internet, and it doesn't take much for these things to deteriorate to the point where they can't be salvaged...

The problem with asking anyone to "stop politicizing the board" is that Wikipedia, and Wikipedians, are actively pushing biased ideologies on both sides of the spectrum. It comes from, and happens to, both right-wingers and left-wingers. Both sides are culpable and both are affected, which is of course reflective of the fact that the English-speaking world is becoming increasingly polarized politically. It would be nice if we could restrict discussion of politics to how Wikipedia allows and even encourages such divisiveness and polarization, even while it tries to fight it... but how do you do that without giving examples of POV pushing from one side or the other? You can't, right? But as soon as you give such an example, the other side pops in with angry accusations of bias and agenda-pushing against the person giving the example, and it just devolves from there.

I'm not saying you should both ignore each other, but I think just about everyone here would prefer it if you could... The question is, obviously, how can that be possible? I must confess that I don't know the answer to that one. Unfortunately, the board doesn't allow us to add members to other members' "ignore" lists without their being able to remove them.

I wonder if a software upgrade would cure that?

Any of you who are determined to paint it as a unique flaw of Wikipedia that it can't always come to grips with the political struggles of determined factions of "POV pushers" seem to be disproven by the fact that the same fights and struggles keep emerging right here as well, complete with people trying to label one another as "nut jobs".

The answer is simple, as long as MR FONORD23 keeps to the subject of "Wikipedia" as his primary intent, then his posts shall live. If he wishes to foist his political ideology and use this place as his personal sword to stick in to Republicans and personally attack those whose political beliefs are different then his, then he should be muzzled. It's that simple. Common sense and good judgment should pervail on this. Now I will not allow this <clever description of FONORD23 mental illness> continue to slander me or stick his WR Sword in to my conservative beliefs with out either relieve from the admin's of this board or I will engage in reciprocity and engage him directly. (see game theory "Tit for Tat"for explanation )
applet to play game

Now I did offer MR FONORD23<clever description of FONORD23 mental illness> to opportunity to debate this outside WR. but I don't think he would like to. No matter in all likelihood a wast of time any way.
So you do what you and be well.

The problem isn't simply that WP can't always deal with conflicting ideologies - the problem is that it presents the results of those conflicts, "won" by one side or the other, as objective fact, with the actual conflict itself relegated to various talk pages, many of which are obscure archived pages that nobody's likely to check.

In this case, for example, we know exactly what the biases are of the two opposing members. The fact that they don't like each other, and express that dislike quite often indeed, is just a natural outgrowth of passionate beliefs in whichever of the two conflicting ideologies applies, combined with the fact that they aren't in close physical proximity to each other. (Or at least, I sincerely hope not! )

Ultimately, what we not trying to do here is encourage conformity or silence extreme views, tempting though that may be at times. And we aren't trying to present a single version of the truth. Wikipedia doesn't always do that either, because in many articles they'll "section it out" to give all the differing POV's at least something. But biased ideologies still dominate often enough to be problematic, and the fundamental design of the software doesn't exactly help.

Early on here I observed (as have all sane people) that WP is a political ideological battlefield with some hot-button political articles being 'owned' by the right wing partisans, and some by the left wing partisans. Any fool can see this. I'm not the contrail-seeing, black helicopter-fleeing, NWO-fearing, Koresh-Weaver-McVeigh worshipping conspiracist who imagines that Wiki is controlled by card-carrying communists just cause every article doesn't read like a press release from AWOLbush's white house.

There's only one tin foil hat wearing conspiracy-believing moonbat here....

josephstalin000 cackled on: Mon 2nd April 2007



josephstalin000 brayed on 22nd March 2007, to DanTobias



Amazing - he's able to channel Joe McCarthy, Michael Savage Weiner, OxyRush Limpig, Alex Jones and David Icke all at once!

Incredibly, they are not as bad as one would imagine. Most entries are predictably naive, but they hold a certain charm. They do appear to be trying for a modicum of neutrality despite Schlafly's ridiculous manifesto. Whatsmore, I snuck in to do some undercover work when it started - testing the administrators with various edits as I guess others have done - and my subtle but deliberately bad right wing edits were quickly removed, whilst my genuine neutral edits still remain.

You're really an APE. You must have some kind of mental irregularity to obsess about me, like this.
I think you are certifiable nuts. Your posts reflect your very narcissistic nature, and your redundant babbling is getting old and shill. Grow up.

With much, much respect, Kato, I disagree. Conservapedia's really bad; they don't pretend to be neutral and I haven't seen a sign that they're trying for a modicum of neutrality. One media outlet (I forget which one) recently commented on how Conservapedia's articles on Clinton and Bush differed (Bush's and those of Republican presidents said "President of the United States under God", while those of Democrats omitted the God part, etc). It looks like they recently changed these articles, but they were written like that for a long time.

One recent article recently compared Conservapedia's article on Dinosaurs with that on Wikipedia, complete with the lovely Conservapedia image of a (presumably giant) Jesus riding a sauropod. They got rid of that embarrassing image, but not before some bloggers got ahold of it. Where was that URL...? Their current article reads like propaganda; it goes into detail on Young Earth Creationism, but only one kind of dinosaur (Stegosaurus) is actually even mentioned in the text (as a species, no less! oops!) Triceratops appears in the image at the top... no mention of any of the thousand other dinosaurs anywhere in the text (Coelacanth, Plesiosaurs, and Loch Ness Monster aren't dinosaurs).

Actually, your experiment sounds cool.

How do you know? What species is the Loch Ness Monster, and in what family is it?

The Loch Ness Monster species is N. rhombopteryxNature link. It is commonly described as having flippers, which no dinosaur had.

Their article on Sherlock Holmes seems relatively neutral, or at least there doesn't appear to be a significant effort in there to claim that Holmes embodied neo-con values. (He wouldn't anyway, I expect, since he was a cocaine user.)

Meanwhile, Nobs has only managed to get the Chipster mentioned in nine articles so far:

http://www.conservapedia.com/Special:Searc...fulltext=Search

What's interesting, to me, is how they handle articles on which there's significant disagreement among the conservatives themselves. For example, for "Female Genital Mutilation," they actually have two articles, taking advantage of MediaWiki's case-sensitivity to make everyone happy:

http://www.conservapedia.com/Female_Genital_Mutilation

http://www.conservapedia.com/Female_genital_mutilation

The first one appears to be an attempt at "value-neutrality," though this actually reflecte the attitude of certain hard-line anti-feminists to the effect that men should have the right to do pretty much whatever they want with "their" women, which obviously involves some pretty scary things. The second version is a bit more in keeping with what most people think of the practice, though it's extremely short - a stub, if there ever was one.

We'll just have to see what they do with it... Or not, as the case may be...

I'm back browsing conservapedia again for the very first time, and checking out the recent changes. The Mitt Romney article looks very humorous. I like this part:



It appears sourced so I don't know...maybe it's just really badly written? Or maybe it's just me.

When a question was asked that obviously should motivate every red blooded american to the ballot box, it was removed

Still pretty bad though.

Hmmm.. Why?

Cripes. You guys could end up with a Mormon president?
Poor old Merkey. He'll be livid. Oh well, I guess he couldn't disfigure the US's global standing anymore than the present incumbent. Regardless of whether one supports or despises the latest US administration, we can be sure that never in recorded history has such a seemingly invincible power fallen from grace so dramatically and so gracelessly. Largely by its own hand it seems.

I can't imagine he'll be nominated... too many people have seen the Zombie Family Christmas Video at this point. Besides, he doesn't have Karl Rove working for him, so there won't be anyone out there using dirty tricks to make up for his inadequacies...

Still, he'll do well among the zombie demographic, which could easily swing a close election, particularly in the Midwest.

Yuk - that Family Christmas Video.

It needs a troop of furious Cherokee led by Merkey to come bursting into the log cabin - wielding ancient weapons and demanding answers as to why the Mormons have so tastelessly appropriated their history and culture. According to Romney's son, Romney has "a duty to his country to run for president". And also a "duty to God" In any other developed nation, uttering such mumbo-jumbo would be tantamount to political suicide.

Incidentally, half way through the video, Ann Romney declares that the best part of her life was going to Iowa! I might suggest that if the public vote for Romney in 2008, it won't be long before there is no Iowa to speak of.

Having followed Conservapedia for a while, I think it is important to keep in mind that it is a very political project with a clear and intentional agenda. One result of this is that the site actually has at least two different "classes" of articles, the "core articles" and the rest.

The core articles are the ones that serve as a vehicle for the political agenda. These are often quite well-written, but of course strongly biased. They are also heavily maintained by the Sysops, and often locked for ordinary editors. Some primary examples are Theory of Evolution, Abortion, Homosexuality and The Bible.

The rest of the articles are fluff. They are there to give the project an impression of seriousness and respectability, to make it seem like a useful educational resource. They can range from good to naive to atrociously bad, and their level of bias varies quite a lot as well - often dependent on whether one of the more extremist editors has noticed it or not.

Some places, it can deal with it. There are a lot of problems in the Christianity articles, particularly caused by the lack of professionals and the resulting incompleteness of understanding, and by the fact that one of the standard out-of-copyright sources (the Catholic Encyclopedia) is extremely biased about Prtestantism. But by and large people accept that substantial disputes are going to have to have both sides be laid out and left at that. And when they don't accept it, they get stepped on.

Current politics and social issues are a huge problem and I don't think any encyclopedia can handle them. The material is too raw, for one thing, but the temptation to POV pushing is comepletely irresistible.


BTW, I have to agree that Conservapedia is largely crap. And it's a shame because I think one of their aims is laudable and ought to executed: getting rid of the "Wikipedia is not censored" principle. I'm sorry, but my kids don't need an extensive reference work on sex toys.

Absolutely. I edit Wikipedia from work on Sundays (nothing else to do; the office is almost empty), and there are quite a few articles I wouldn't consider work-safe. I'm not sure what the educational value of some of these articles is.

Actually, I think it's a very stupid question, and it appears a person tried to make it not sound so stupid and gave up, removing it.

I've edited Conservapedia but I fear that my edits will not last (and likely I won't last long there as a result).

The way the Homosexuality article is written is just vile and sick (IMHO). Almost everyone on the talk page that protested against it in its current form have been banned. Technically, such an article shouldn't be on the site, but Schlafly has made it an exception to push his anti-Homosexuality agenda. No pro-gay POV allowed or even considered.